New mobile game designed to advance early diagnosis research for dementia

Deutsche Telekom have today (May 4) launched a brand new mobile game to help in the fight against dementia, with just two minutes of gameplay able to provide five hours worth of essential dementia research.

The game, called Sea Hero Quest, has been designed by scientists from University College London, University of East Anglia, Alzheimer's Research UK and game designers from Glitchers.

The multi-platform title is specifically designed to help advance our understanding of spatial navigation and how this aspect of our brain works, as part of a co-ordinated effort to bring the world a step closer to manage the growing threat of dementia.

It would in theory take over 300 minutes, or five hours, of traditional research to gather as much data as from just one person playing Sea Hero Quest for two minutes.

Chief Executive at the charity Alzheimer's Research UK, Hilary Evans commented: "We have never seen anything undertaken in dementia research at this scale before. The data set that Deutsche Telekom's Sea Hero Quest generates is truly unprecedented, until now these kind of investigations took years to coordinate and at best gave us a snap shot of how a very small sample of volunteers behaved. The largest spatial navigation study to date comprised less than 600 volunteers. Providing the research community with access to an open source data set of this nature, at this scale, in such a short period of time is exactly the kind of innovation required to unlock the next breakthrough in dementia research".

Deutsche Telekom's Chief Brand Officer, Hans-Christian Schwingen added: "Deutsche Telekom believe in the power of sharing. We knew that there must be a way of empowering everyone to share their time to help to move us one step closer to a breakthrough in the field of dementia. At the same time, we realised that if we wanted to achieve real scale and truly make a difference, we needed to make it fun for everyone involved. We needed to create something that would get people gaming for good."

Each aspect of the game has been jointly designed by developers and scientists to provide insights about the way in which we all navigate every day. Players have to make their way through mazes of islands and icebergs, with every second of gameplay then able to be translated into scientific data by experts exploring that area of our brains.

All of the gameplay data collected is to be anonymised and stores securely within T-Systems data center in Munich, ensuring data integrity and data privacy according to German data security law.

Sea Hero Quest is available now globally for iOS and Android, and can be downloaded for free from the App Store and Google Play.

by Daniel Falconer for www.femalefirst.co.uk
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